3. Beautiful Facts: Science, Secularism, and Affect

Abstract

This is an essay about pages.It's about the way that pages leap to life, and the way that knowledge, far from lying flat on the page, enfolds our hypersensitive bodies, creating registers of meaning that compel passions, compel power, compel bodies to move.When we think about a reader, we think about a sovereign, studious mind, a still body travelling outwards to an abstract exterior, then returning for quiet, structured reflection.Instead, I want us to think of the reader as a body enthralled, a body possessed, an addict.To diagram this vital relationship between the still page and the moving body, this paper turns to the resources of contemporary affect theory.Affect theory is a movement emerging out of contemporary queer theory and poststructural philosophy that emphasizes the correlations between non-linguistic forces and power.Where late 20 th -century critical theory tended to focus on power as operating through the medium of language, affect theory reasserts the salience of living bodies as nodes for the flows of power.For affect theorists, language is not the currency of power, but a formation within a broader, organic network of power coursing through bodies.Affect theory, then, calls on us to think about pages as things that chain us, that thrill us, that cut us and make us dance.The affective frame prompts us to think of reading not as a computer program that we run and then switch off, but as what anthropologist Kathleen Stewart would call a "surge" running through us.Within the framework of affect theory, affect animates every aspect of embodied life, including the ostensibly affect-neutral domain of knowledge-production.Even science.Even religious, even secular frames of knowledge about God.Affect theory prompts us to ask not just what we know, not just how we know, but how knowledge feels.Specifically, affect theory asks after the way that the things we know and believe shape the contours of our embodied life-dictating and directing where our bodies go.Not only religion, but humanistic scholarship, science, and secularism itself, I will suggest, are all wrapped up in these processes, channeling and directing landscapes of feeling that are inextricable from structures of belief and disbelief.As a case study, this paper will turn to the affective agenda of the New Atheism.Where atheists have tended to see themselves as sober philosophers stonily erasing the sentimentality of religious superstition, I want to use the register of affect to ask, instead, the question posed by Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini at the outset of their 2008 volume Secularisms: "What does secularism 'feel' like?" 1 These, then, are the pages of a postsecular memoir.

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